Path: utzoo!attcan!ncrcan!ziebmef!daniel From: daniel@ziebmef.mef.org (Daniel Albano) Newsgroups: comp.lang.apl Subject: Re: APL Machines Message-ID: <1989Sep5.153557.9841@ziebmef.mef.org> Date: 5 Sep 89 19:35:55 GMT References: Reply-To: daniel@ziebmef.mef.org (Daniel Albano) Distribution: comp Organization: Ziebmef Public Access Unix, Toronto, Ontario Lines: 26 There was an APL machine (by that name) produced by a corporation somewhere on the east coast of the US. It was based on 68000 processors, back when that was one of the new, high speed CPU chips. I saw it at a computer show in Toronto, and it seemed quite capable. As for performance, type checking and rank checking should not be a major concern, as you should be able to do it once for each reference to a symbol. If the symbols are a decent size, the actual overhead wrt. computation should be insignificant (or rather, if the data pointed to by the symbols are a decent size). I suspect that there is no advantage in embedding APL arrays in an internal vector representation. This is just a suspicion, but if the data are really 3-arrays, why not store them as such (which are really vectors anyway, but why confuse ourselves! :-) ). If it is to be a real APL, I don't think you can omit []CT and []IO, though you could make a case for omitting []PP as it "only" affects the display of values, not the values calculated themselves. As for nested arrays, I have never found a particularly compelling need for them, but I am sure opinions differ. Daniel Albano Toronto, Ontario